The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The packaging of data into data packets for network transfer and the reassembly of the data packets on the receiving end consumes a large amount of CPU cycles on a host computer system. As network bandwidth increases using higher speeds, such as the gigabit range, the workload on the host computer system increases. This causes the host computer system to spend more valuable CPU cycles managing network communications instead of executing application programs.
Transport control protocol (TCP) and Internet protocol (IP) are commonly used for packet network communications and are defined in Request for Comments (RFC) documents maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). TCP/IP or transport offload engines (TOE) are used to move TCP/IP processing from the operating system to a specialized processor, often located on a network interface card (NIC). Adding a TOE can dramatically increase throughput. A TOE takes the job of translating all or part of the TCP/IP protocol away from the host's main processor, thus freeing up the host computer system to run other applications.
TCP/IP utilizes socket connections. The host computer system must notify the TOE of the sockets that it wants the TOE to handle. The host computer system transfers socket control information to the TOE. Some TOEs store the socket control information in a data structure in memory local to the TOE. During socket processing, the TOE references the socket control information to manage the socket communications. However, as the transfer speed across the network increases, the socket control information must be accessed faster and more efficiently.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for a system that provides for the management of socket control information for high-speed networks in a highly accessible manner. Additionally, there is a need for a system that would allow operations such as transmit and receive to reference socket control information at a higher priority than other operations.